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AI is different

antirez.com

531–540 of 920 posts

Re: AI is different

#531
post #74

When I hear folks glazing some kinda impending jobless utopia , I think of the intervening years. I shudder. As they say, "An empty stomach knows no morality."

This pisses me off so much. So many engineers are so excited to work on and with these systems, opening 20 prs per day to make their employers happy going “yes boss!” They think their $300k total compensation will give them a seat at the table for what they’re cheering on to come. I say that anyone who needed to go the grocery this week will not be spared by the economic downturn this tech promises. Unless you have y…

> I say that anyone who needed to go the grocery this week will not be spared by the economic downturn this tech promises.

And we are getting to a point that is us or them. Big tech is investing so much money on this that if they do not succeed, they will go broke.

Re: AI is different

#532

There’s a simple flaw in this reasoning: Just because X can be replaced by Y today doesn’t imply that it can do so in a Future where we are aware of Y, and factor it into the background assumptions about the task. In more concrete terms: if “not being powered by AI” becomes a competitive advantage, then AI won’t be meaningfully replacing anything in that market. You can already see this with YouTube: AI-generated vid…

One thing to keep in mind is not so much that AI would replace the work of video creators for general video consumption, but rather it could create personalized videos or music or whatever. I experimented with creating a bunch of AI music [1] that was tailored to my interests and tastes, and I enjoy listening to them. Would others? I doubt it, but so what? As the tools get better and easier, we can create our own art to reflect our lives. There will still be great human art that will rise to the top, but the vast inundation of slop to the general public may disappear. Imagine the fun of collaboratively designing whole worlds and stories with people, such as with tabletop role-playing, but far more immersive and not having to have a separate category of creators or waiting on companies to release products.

1: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbB9v1PTH3Y86BSEhEQjv...

Re: AI is different

#533
post #7

In every technology wave so far, we've disrupted many existing jobs. However we've also opened up new kinds of jobs. And, because it is easier to retrain humans than build machines for those jobs, we wound up with more and better jobs. This is the first technology wave that doesn't just displace humans, but which can be trained to the new job opportunities more easily than humans can. Right now it can't replace human…

The industrial revolution took something like 98% of jobs and farms and just disappeared them.

Could you a priori in 1800 have predicted the existence of graphics artists? Street sweepers? People who drive school buses? The whole infrastructure around trains? Sewage maintainers? Librarians? Movie stuntmen? Sound Engineers? Truck drivers?

Re: AI is different

#534

There’s a simple flaw in this reasoning: Just because X can be replaced by Y today doesn’t imply that it can do so in a Future where we are aware of Y, and factor it into the background assumptions about the task. In more concrete terms: if “not being powered by AI” becomes a competitive advantage, then AI won’t be meaningfully replacing anything in that market. You can already see this with YouTube: AI-generated vid…

Poorly made videos are poorly made videos.

Whether poor videos made by a human directly, or poorly made by a human using AI.

The use of software like AI to create videos with sloppy quality and reaults reflects on their skill.

Currently the use of AI leans towards sloppy because of the lower digital literacy of content creators with AI, and once they get into it, realizing how much goes into videos.

Re: AI is different

#535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to further elaborate on this with another example: the writing industry. (Technical, professional, marketing, etc. writing - not books.) The default logic is that AI will just replace all writing tasks, and writers will go extinct. What actually seems to be happening, however, is this: - obviously written-by-AI copywriting is perceived very negatively by the market - companies want writers that understand how to…

The assumption here is that LLMs will never pass the Turing test for copywriting, i.e. AI writing will always be distinguishable from human writing. Given that models that produce intelligible writing didn't exist a few years ago, that's a very bold assumption.

Today’s models are tuned to output the average quality of their corpus.

This could change with varying results.

What is average quality? For some it’s a massive upgrade. For others it’s a step down. For the experienced it’s seeing through it.

Re: AI is different

#536
post #59

I'm skeptical of arguments like this. If we look at most impactful technologies since the year 2000, AI is not even in my top 3. Social networking, mobile computing, and cloud computing have all done more to alter society and daily life than has AI. And yes, I recognize that AI has already created profound change, in that every software engineer now depends heavily on copilots, in that education faces a major integri…

I’m skeptical of arguments like this. If we look at most impactful technologies since the year 1980, the Web is not even in my top 3. Personal computers, spreadsheet software, and desktop publishing have all done more to alter society and daily life than has the Web. And yes, I recognize that the Web has already created profound change, in that every researcher now depends heavily on online databases, in that commerce faces a major disruption challenge, and in that information access has been completely changed. I just don’t think those changes are on the same level as the normalization of powerful computers on everyone’s desk, as our business processes becoming increasingly digitized, nor as the enablement for small businesses to produce professional-quality documents without having to maintain expensive typesetting equipment. To me, the treating of the Web as “different” is still unsubstantiated. Could we get there? Absolutely. We just haven’t yet. But some people start to talk about it almost in a way that’s reminiscent of Pascal’s Wager, as if the slight chance of a godly reward from investing in Web technologies means it is rational to devote our all to it. But I’m still holding my breath.

Re: AI is different

#537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Book and music album covers are often done with AI These suck. Things made with AI just suck big time. Not only are they stupid but they have negative value on your product. I cannot think of single purely AI made video, song or any form of art that is any a good. All AI has done is falsely convince ppl that they can now create things that they had no skills to do before AI.

I mean, test after test have shown that the vast, vast majority of humans are woefully unable to distinguish good AI art made by SOTA models from human art, and in many/most cases actively prefer it. Maybe you’re a gentleman of such discerningly superior taste that you can always manage to identify the spark of human creativity that eludes the rest of us. Or maybe you’ve just told yourself you hate it and therefore y…

you couldve given me an example instead of this butthurt comment :)

Re: AI is different

#538
post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few months ago I saw one driverless car maybe every three days. Now I see roughly 3-5 every day. I get that it’s taken a long time and a lot of hype that hasn’t panned out. But once the tech works and it’s just about juicing the scale then things shift rapidly. Even if you think “oh that’s the next generation’s problem” if there is a chance you’re wrong, or if you want to be kind to the next generation: now is the…

UBI is not a good solution because you still have to provision everything on the market, so it's a subsidy to private companies that sell the necessities of life on the market. If we're dreaming up solutions to problems, much better would be to remove the essentials from the market and provide them to everyone universally. Non-market housing, healthcare, education all provided to every citizen by virtue of being a hu…

Your solution would ultimately lead to treating all those items as uniform goods, but they are not. There are preferences different people have. This is why the price system is so useful. It indicates what is desired by various people and gives strong signals as to what to make or not. If you have a central authority making the decisions, they will not get it right. Individual companies may not get it right, but the corrective mechanism of failure (profit loss, bankruptcy) corrects that while when governments provide this, it is extremely difficult to correct it as it is one monolithic block. In the market, you can choose various different companies for different needs. In the government in a democracy, you have to choose all of one politician or all of another. And as power is concentrated, the worst people go after it. It is true with companies, but people can choose differently. With the state, there is no alternative. That is what makes it the state rather than a corporation.

It is also interesting that you did not mention food, clothing and super-computers-in-pockets. While government is involved in everything, they are less involved in those markets than with housing, healthcare, and education, particularly in mandates as to what to do. Government has created the problem of scarcity in housing, healthcare, and education. Do you really think the current leadership of the US should control everyone's housing, healthcare, and education? The idea of a UBI is that it strips the politicians of that fine-grained control. There is still control that can be leveraged, but it comes down to a single item of focus. It could very well be disastrous, but it need not be whereas the more complex system that you give politicians control over, the more likely it will be disastrous.

Re: AI is different

#539
post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Humans use only cameras. Not true. Humans also interpret the environment in 3D space. See a Tesla fail against a Wile E. Coyote-inspired mural which humans perceive: https://youtu.be/IQJL3htsDyQ?t=14m34s

This video proves nothing other than "a YouTuber found a funny viral video idea". Teslas "interpret the environment in 3D space" too - by feeding all the sensor data into a massive ML sensor fusion pipeline, and then fusing that data across time too. This is where the visualizers, both the default user screen one and the "Terminator" debugging visualizer, get their data from. They show plain and clear that the car op…

Maybe watch the rest of the video. The Tesla, unlike the LiDAR car, also failed the fog and rain tests. The mural was just the last and funniest one.

Let’s also not forget murals like that do exist in real life. And those aren’t foam.

https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg...

Additionally, as the other commenter pointed out, trucks often have murals painted on them, either as art or adverts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truck_art_in_South_Asia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekotora

Search for “truck ads” and you’ll find a myriad companies offering the service.

Re: AI is different

#540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to further elaborate on this with another example: the writing industry. (Technical, professional, marketing, etc. writing - not books.) The default logic is that AI will just replace all writing tasks, and writers will go extinct. What actually seems to be happening, however, is this: - obviously written-by-AI copywriting is perceived very negatively by the market - companies want writers that understand how to…

As someone who used to be in the writing industry (a whole range of jobs), this take strikes me as a bit starry-eyed. Throw-away snippets, good-enough marketing, generic correspondence, hastily compiled news items, flairful filler text in books etc., all this used to be a huge chunk of the work, in so many places. The average customer had only a limited ability to judge the quality of texts, to put it mildly. Transla…

What I understand is AI leads certain markets to be smaller in terms of economics. Wayy smaller actually. Only few industry will keep growing because of this.
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